12th November - Daedalus, Lee-On-The-Solent, Hampshire

From Titchfield Haven, Ian and I drove the short distance to an area of warehouses, small businesses and residential housing on the edge of the Solent Airport or the old site of HMS Daedalus.  Over the last few years this has been a regular site for Black Redstart with a pair having been present.  Just recently there have been reports of sightings and with the excellent light today it presented a great opportunity to get some shorts of another enigmatic bird.

We parked in Courageous road and then walked to the line of permanent and temporary fencing that surrounds a relatively new warehouse on the old Overlord site.  It was a case of scanning the fences, and the building tops and sides and I very quickly found one a Black Redstart on one of the temporary fences.

It was then a case of trying to get closer to the bird, following it as it moved from fences.

To the top of a truck

And into the surrounding trees

And the very top of the surrounding buildings, I know this is not in focus, but I liked the shadow.

The Black Redstart is a small robin-sized bird that has adapted to live at the heart of industrial and urban centres. Its name comes from the plumage of the male, which is grey-black in colour with a red tail.  Black Redstarts can be found all year round; some are summer visitors, some are passage migrants in the spring and autumn, and others are resident.

In the summer, the male bird's plumage is quite striking: grey-black upperparts, sooty black breast and face, a bold white wing patch, and a rusty-red rump and tail.   In the winter the male retains the lighter wing panel, but looks like the female, which is duller, brown-grey with the rust-red rump and tail.

This bird I believe to be a male, showing the pale white in the wings.

The Black Redstart is a fairly small chat, which in turn is a flycatcher of the family Muscicapidae, rather than a thrush as was traditionally thought. It has a mostly dark body and orange-red tail and hind quarters, with a dark band down the centre. In the field, the sometimes habitual 'shivering' of its orange tail can be what first grabs the attention out of the corner of your eye, as it lands.

It finally came down from the tree and occupied what we considered to be more suitable for Black Redstart.

But now we had a different bird, this one lacking the wing panel, more like a female.

Here the male, showing the white panels a little better.

The species originally inhabited stony ground in mountains, particularly cliffs, but since about 1900 has expanded to include similar urban habitats including bombed areas during and after World War II, and large industrial complexes that have the bare areas and cliff-like buildings it favours; in Great Britain, most of the small breeding population nests in such industrial areas

First recorded as breeding in Britain at the Wembley Exhibition Centre, London, in 1926, the species needed the destruction of the World War II and its aftermath to properly put down roots.  It is usually found around power stations, industrial sites and buildings with sparsely weedy and stony areas for foraging, habitat that was plentiful around this site.

There has been a notable decline in Britain's Black Redstart population, with its conservation status being upgraded from Amber to Red. This is likely to be linked to the gradual disappearance of abandoned and wrecked buildings. Black Redstart found the post-war construction boom to its advantage, but this meant that its territories were often ephemeral.

Gentrification and redevelopment are its enemy, often ridding towns of foraging places, if not their cliff-like buildings. The Birmingham area was one of the key breeding locations in Britain until this century, but the last survey of the West Midlands in 2016 found no breeding pairs, while there has been a similar nose-dive in Sheffield, Nottingham and Ipswich.

It is possible that climate change might mitigate for this in a small way, enabling sparse survival in a country with an incrementally more temperate environment. Recent conservation work has seen the provision of green roofs in cities as an encouragement for Black Redstart to remain in established locations, but there has been little conclusive research on whether this has worked.

There has been some debate as to why Black Redstart maintains such a fragile toehold in Britain, but it seems that our subspecies of European Robin may have filled some of the appropriate ecological niches which it is otherwise kept out of by competition with greater numbers of Black Redstarts on the Continent. However, the species retains its tentative British presence. 

We finally saw two birds together as they were fly catching around the walls of the buildings in the sun.  It took a while but eventually one, the female type, cam down on to the ground to forage.

This was actually a first of the year for me and a very welcome end to a very successful day